Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Open Source AJAX Frameworks - I

Google Web Toolkit

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile. GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

ICEfaces

ICEfaces is an integrated Ajax application framework that enables Java EE application developers to easily create and deploy thin-client rich Internet applications (RIA) in pure Java. ICEfaces leverages the entire standards-based Java EE ecosystem of tools and execution environments. Rich enterprise application features are developed in pure Java, and in a pure thin-client model. There are no Applets or proprietary browser plug-ins required. ICEfaces applications are JavaServer Faces (JSF) applications, so Java EE application development skills apply directly and Java developers are isolated from doing any JavaScript related development.

DWR

DWR is a Java open source library which allows you to write Ajax web sites. It allows code in a browser to use Java functions running on a web server just as if it was in the browser. DWR works by dynamically generating Javascript based on Java classes. The code does some Ajax magic to make it feel like the execution is happening on the browser, but in reality the server is executing the code and DWR is marshalling the data back and forwards.